Monday, March 12, 2018

A Medieval Interactive Map of Britain

Matthew Paris' Map of Britain is one of the first ever geographical maps of Britain. It was made by a 13th Century monk called Matthew Paris. The map is one of the first medieval maps to move away from a schematic plan (e.g. a strip map or route map) and to instead attempt an accurate geographical representation.

The map was made hundreds of years before the development of accurate surveying tools. It is therefore remarkable how accurate the map is. However it does contain many errors ....

My Matthew Paris' Map of Britain is a short story-map that I created to explore some of Matthew Paris' errors and to begin to understand the geographical conception he had of Britain in the 13th Century. The map also includes modern English translations of the medieval place-names. Just click on the map to view these translateions.

This map was created using Leaflet.js. It also uses Leaflet-IIIF, to import the IIIF manifest of Corpus Christi College's manuscript of Matthew Paris' map into Leaflet. The story-element makes heavy use of waypoints.js to trigger the map actions on page scroll.